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Comment by smugma | Hacker News Reader

I think SFFD is rightfully worried about robotaxis but this doesn’t seem to be the case. When cameras are recording everything, you can’t just make up facts.

“The video captured by Cruise showed that the ambulance parked behind the Cruise and did not attempt to pass the robotaxi in the rightmost unblocked lane. Instead, responders moved a firetruck to allow the ambulance to pass on the left. The video, which Cruise declined to share publicly, indicates that 90 seconds elapsed between the patient being put on the stretcher and the ambulance leaving the scene.”

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I think the safe default assumption is that if the ambulance driver didn't use the right lane, there was probably a good reason. Clearly the firetruck driver agreed with them. Maybe traffic was moving so quickly that they'd have to accelerate hard and risk hurting the patient, or they were concerned about getting rear-ended. Regardless, Cruise's vehicle clearly was at fault for not getting out of the way.

Assuming the Ambulance driver was competent, the good reason was likely the patient not being secured and thus they wouldn’t have left for a significant fraction of those 90 seconds in either case.

The cruse driver could still have slowed their exit by a few seconds even without being a significant obstacle. The issue is ambulances encounter a lot of cars on the way to and from an accident, so a few seconds per car can add up to a significant delay overall.

Drives me mad when there’s armchair bickering about “well you could have just done X.”

Doesn’t matter. If there’s a law about getting out of the way, offering maximum space and choices to emergency vehicles, and you didn’t do that, you failed and you broke the law.

One can definitely bicker about the details, but it doesn’t change anything about the fact that the vehicle failed to obey the law.

The fact that there was traffic flowing to the right seems to indicate that the scenario was such that people weren’t stopping and pulling over.

> Doesn’t matter. If there’s a law about getting out of the way, offering maximum space and choices to emergency vehicles, and you didn’t do that, you failed and you broke the law.

Then we can talk about whether the vehicle operator failed to obey the law, but I think we're talking about something far more serious, which is whether Cruise indirectly killed a man.

In determining whether Cruise has moral responsibility over this death, it is then natural for citizens to look over the video footage and ask what's going on.

Yeah, not going to argue the lightning rod of a headline even if it was careful not to actually say “Cruise killed a man.”

If there was a reason that the ambulance didn't move right, then wouldn't that same reason exist preventing the taxi from moving right? Even moreso since they don't have lights and sirens like the ambulance?

In many places it's illegal to pass on the right. I assume the driver probably didn't want to get disciplined.

"Maybe traffic was moving so quickly that they'd have to accelerate hard and risk hurting the patient,"

This shouldn't be an issue - traffic is required to yield.

"Regardless, Cruise's vehicle clearly was at fault for not getting out of the way."

Yes, at fault for not getting out of the way. The article is a little misleading with it's insinuating that the patient death was somehow related.

> traffic is required to yield.

And traffic is required to yield to me when I step into the road, but I still wouldn’t start crossing if I saw a car coming with no sign of stopping.

Yeah, you don't have lights, sirens, and a large vehicle either. Really should be a non-issue in this instance.

Ok so the guys and gals who we pay to save your life are saying they're getting in the way. But MLRoboCorporation(TM)(c)(r) says fuck those guys, they can go around?

I think I'll side with the humans on this one, let them take control of the vehicle.

I don't care how much money Kyle Vogt loses to car theft, that's not my problem. Clearly this industry needs to get regulated hard.

oh no dont speak ill of Ycombinator's startup bros. You will get downvoted!

Loved Justin.TV and how they helped shake up the media industrty up ... all the start-up bro ethos followed there successfully helped kill and bring new media business models (all the Frasier, Seinfeld, etc 24/7 channels on Justin.TV). Awesome!

Applying that same killing it here theory (Cruise trying to rapidly .. rapidly expand in many, many cities while Waymo with its WAY better track record as of late August is expanding to only one city .. Austin) is just down right deadly as we seen with Travis Kalanick's version of trying to kill it and in turn killing a pedestrian. Who cares if you kill business and in turn new business come from that .. that's awesome but killing people to kill it and win this race. Irresponsible and disgusting and again they're expanding to 5 to ten more cities (Nashville, DC, Austin, etc, etc) yet causing chaos in San Fran (Waymo is not & they have been working on this tech since 2007).

So you will just always defer to public safety officials for everything they want and desire in the name of that safety?

That seems like it would be bad idea

This is a strawman, try again.

that was your literal statement, that public safety people only care about the people, and the big bad evil company only cares about their profits

so we should only ever listen to public safety people...

> “The video captured by Cruise showed that the ambulance parked behind the Cruise and did not attempt to pass the robotaxi in the rightmost unblocked lane. Instead, responders moved a firetruck to allow the ambulance to pass on the left. The video, which Cruise declined to share publicly, indicates that 90 seconds elapsed between the patient being put on the stretcher and the ambulance leaving the scene.”

Why isn't the video shared if it proves they're innocent? Smells strange.

if you have video of somebody being put on a stretcher before they died, it's best not to share that too widely. for legal reasons as well as just general humanity.

They don't need to publish it on a website. They could release it to the local news orgs that handle this type of video daily. It's not hard to blur things that would be offensive.

Isn't that exactly what they've done? Forbes, NBC, KRON4, SFStandard, and probably other news orgs have all reviewed the video.

I'm not sure how many orgs have seen it. I've heard of two and we don't have any way of knowing if they saw an edited or full copy and from all available angles. They apparently haven't been allowed to make a copy of it and broadcast it so we can make up our own minds.

From the article, it implies the patient wasn't recorded on video.

> The video, which Cruise declined to share publicly [...] does not capture the patient being loaded onto the ambulance.

> A Cruise spokesperson said the company offered to share video footage with San Francisco officials. As of Saturday morning, Cruise said, city officials had not reviewed the footage. It was unclear why.

They offered to share it with the city officials, apparently. There’s no strange smell in the fact that they didn’t decide to share it with the general public.

I mean, for all we know it might show the emergency services making an error in the heat of the moment and they might be holding it back to preserve their relationship with the city. (I’m not saying this is likely, just saying there are plenty of reasons that holding the video might be more tactful than nefarious).

> Video and other surveillance data gathered by Cruise and reviewed by The Standard

The SF Standard might have a tech bias due to its funding, but giving them access and offering the city access seems reasonable enough to not suspect anything fishy.

90 seconds is fast. It’s often longer than that. Besides safety straps, there’s leads, transfer from scoop/backboard to the full stretcher, bags, goo, more secondary vitals to take..

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